I've undone the change in bzr for now since it seems not correct and rather a workaround, could you at least explain what the change is supposed to do exactly, why can't xsplash be changed rather and what happens to users not have xsplash installed? the change should also be taken upstream if it makes sense in all cases

I suggest that we punt this bug to Lucid. It seems that there may be issues to discuss regarding how to fix it. There are too many Critical and High bugs in the Karmic ATM to warrant effort on priority = Low.

It's like you see a delicious dish of food with a dead fly on the CENTER of it. A lot of work can be done on other bugs, but all those work will not have any positive effect if people feel bad. :-) People will not know that ubuntu team has fixed so many bugs that prevented so many problems (say those crashes happen to 1% of people) but everyone will notice (sort of) the ugliness by placing a cursor in the middle of the screen breaking all the supposed aesthetic value xsplash is to give.

We already set the cursor to blank. If you start xsplash from a terminal you'll see that the cursor is invisible. I'm not sure why the cursor is visible when you login, but I'm sure it's probably for some really weird crazy reason and that's why this bug is marked as low priority.

I did not know that the cursor has already been removed (from the code). Do you mean that if everything runs as designed there will not be a cursor? (On my machine it is a round cursor ie. "busy"). I thought this aesthetic issue has been ignored from the posts above.

But if it is just me, how can I identify the problem? Is there any configuration files I can do? Does remove --purge and reinstall resolve the problem?

In X you can't just turn off the cursor globally, and a lot of people seem to be expecting that to happen. You can only set a cursor bitmap on a specific window. What was happening in xsplash so far is that I set a blank cursor on the xsplash window, and if you ran xsplash from a terminal you would not see the cursor. But when you logged in you would see the cursor when it appeared to be over the xsplash window.

The problem is that we're starting xsplash before compiz starts, and for reasons I'm not going to describe in depth here we also initialize the X compositing overlay window. So right now when you've seen a cursor over the xsplash window, it's actually been because your mouse cursor is on the cow, not on xsplash. You'll still see a brief time where the cursor becomes visible and then invisible again, and that's when compiz starts and takes over the cow. Talking to a compiz developer, I believe there is no solution to that right now.

I propose that we consider this a relatively minor issue, and focus on crashers and other High or Critical priority bugs for the rest of Karmic. We should move this into Lucid though, as solve this as we refine the start up experience in 10.04.